Purchasing and Financing Nesting Software

Feature: Nesting Beneath the Clamps

What is it?

Nesting Beneath the Clamps (NBC) is an automatic nesting feature whereby the material clamp strip is made available for nesting parts. Without NBC, a trim strip, typically three to four inches, is normally required all the way across the length of the material. This can result in up to a 10% loss of useable material. With NBC, we are able to place parts in this area of the sheet because we know where the clamps are, how large they are, and how close we can safely punch near them. Once all the "safe hits" have been made, we will automatically reposition the clamps on the sheet, thus allowing us to safely punch the hits in the locations where the clamps previously were.

Where is it used?

This feature is available in turret punch-only and turret punch combination (punch/shear, punch/laser, punch/plasma) nesting applications.

How does it work?

Setting the Controls

NBC within AxiomVE™ (nesting engine) automatically accommodates nesting within the clamp zones. You’re in control with “set-and-forget” parameters for nesting tolerances reflecting the clamp sizes, station sizes, and station locations for your particular machine to achieve optimal efficiency without risk of machine damage.

Creating the Nest

AxiomVE creates a nest utilizing the clamp strip as though there were no clamps. During nest output, the punch minimization logic safely sorts all of the tool hits that are outside the clamp dead zones. Next, an automatic reposition occurs that moves the clamps to an area already punched. It is now safe to make the punch hits that were previously in the clamp dead zones.

What are the benefits?

Material Savings

Fabricators can see a noticeable increase in material savings using NBC. Often a 3-4" trim strip is summarily discarded because it is impractical to manually nest within that area and still accommodate the machine clamps. With NBC the user can see a significant reduction of the trim strip material waste converted to usable parts. A small portion of the trim strip, for example, one inch is retained in the sheet skeleton to maintain material integrity.

Damage Control

Most programmers hesitate to nest within the clamp zone over concerns of punching the clamps and damaging the turret punch. Nesting Beneath the Clamps both eliminates the risk of machine damage through tightly controlled programming settings and the elimination of human programming error.

Labor Efficiency

The nesting, tooling, repositioning and programming is all automatic; saving countless hours of programming.